Watercraft are typically secured to a dock by the use of ropes or lines which are tied or looped over cleats on the watercraft and docks. A common method of fastening these ropes to a cleat or mooring post is by looping the rope around the cleat or post and tying it off with one or more knots. The tying and untying of a good knot, however, requires skill not typically possessed by the recreational boater.
To eliminate the need for tying knots, boat tie lines have been made with an eye, or bight at one end which can be looped quickly and easily over a cleat or post. Typically the eye is formed by bending an end of the rope back upon itself and splicing it to form a closed loop. In the past, these tie lines have been hand spliced by weaving at the end of the rope into the woven body of the inward portion of the rope. While this type of splice provides good strength, the formation of the splice is time consuming and requires substantial skill. As such, in these hand spliced tie lines tend to be very expensive. Also, as they rub against the edge of the boat or dock, as the moored boat moves with the motion of waves, the splice becomes chafed requiring either replacement of the tie line or cutting and re-splicing the line.
To reduce this production time and expense, tie lines have been manufactured with mechanical splices which hold the rope in a permanent loop. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,236,281 shows a mechanical clamp with two sections which sandwich the inward and end portion of a rope looped positioned therebetween. Each section has two concave channels with a series of teeth which grip the rope to reduce the possibility of slippage. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 2,835,012 shows a mechanical clamp made of sheet metal with a middle portion defined by an upstruck ridge and two outer shoulders that are bendable over the middle portion to form a splice. A rope or line is spliced by laying it atop the sheet metal in a position crossing the upstruck ridge so that the outer shoulders of the metal sheet are bent over the rope segments compressing the rope against the ridge.
While these mechanical clamps are easy and inexpensive to produce, they nevertheless tend to slip when loaded and stressed. This occurs because a twisted or braided multifibrous rope becomes slimmer when stretched. Once thinned in this manner the rope no longer is pressed firmly against the outer mechanical clamp and thus can slide therein under the same load that has caused it to slim down.
Other examples of mechanical splices are seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,912,816 and 5,339,498 which provide devices that allow an adjustable eye to be formed in the end of the tie line with minimal use of knots. These devices comprise a unitary body having channels through which the rope is threaded in opposite directions. The rope is prevented from passing back through the channel by tying a knot in the rope end as shown in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,912,816, or wedging the rope end within a V shaped notch as shown in the U.S. Pat. No. 5,339,498. While these slip knot type clamps eliminate the problem of slippage encountered with the previously described permanent eye clamps they are cumbersome and often require re-threading.
Accordingly, it is seen that there remains a need for a line splice that is simple and inexpensive to produce, but yet has the strength of a hand interwoven splice. It is to the provision of such a splice and a method of forming such that the current invention is primarily directed.